GERMANY: Amends to the Jews

For what Chancellor Adenauer called
unspeakable crimes committed in the name of the German people," West
Germany's Bundestag last week voted world Jewry $822 million in
reparations. It was ten years after Hitler's SS began liquidating the
Warsaw Ghetto, eight years after the murder of the last of 6,000,000
European Jews; in West Germany only 20,000 of the pre-Hitler Jewish
population of 600,000 survives. Some Jews objected to the reparations
on the grounds that money could never repay lives, and that Germans
should not be allowed to purchase an easing of their conscience. But
the important thing about the reparations...